


Home is whenever I'm with you

by Poetry



Category: Doctor Who, Torchwood
Genre: Alternate Universe – Homeward Bounders Fusion, Community: wintercompanion, Dimension Travel, Harm to Children, M/M, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 13:44:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/913885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which our heroes travel the multiverse to find a way back Home, only to discover they'd been Home all along. A fusion with <i>The Homeward Bounders</i> by Diana Wynne Jones, though no knowledge of the book is needed to enjoy the story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home is whenever I'm with you

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the wintercompanion summer holiday fest to the prompt "70, Platinum, Engineer Primus, the Summer Revolution."

Jacerel hadn’t meant to find _them_. But then, no one ever means to find _them_.

He’d been looking for shelter for his parents and Gray, a place where the bombs wouldn’t fall. He’d found an abandoned town further inland. The buildings were intact, their insides scoured clean. The townspeople had packed up and left, but there was no sign of an attack from the Others.

He was looking for a bunker, a building that would protect them. The streets were eerily quiet and still, the buildings and gardens already starting to fall into disrepair, weeds sprouting up where they shouldn’t be.

There was one building, though, that was a little too clean. 

It was a House of the Dead, where death-speakers spoke and listened. It had all the right markings for one, all faded and smudged a little. But there was one marking out of place, one that looked as fresh and crisp as if it had just been put there. At the gate to the House of the Dead was the symbol of an anchor.

Jacerel pressed his fingers to the relief carving in the stone. Anchors weren’t a threshold-symbol to mark the space between life and death. They were the opposite. They kept you steady in the flow of life, or bound you to the cold peace of death. A House of the Dead had no use for anchors. 

But Jacerel’s family might have a use for this place. Builders cut corners sometimes, but they never spared any expense on a House of the Dead. It would be built strong, if it was a House at all. That was why Jacerel took a running leap and jumped over the fence. 

He wasn’t so bold as to walk in through the front door. You could only go through there if you were a death-speaker, or if you were invited by one. But when he went around the back, he found a private door. The death-speakers had needs too. They needed herbs and fuel for their fires, and someone to sweep the floors. This was the service door. It was made of black stone, like the front door, but instead of a matte dark void, this stone was cut to be reflective. 

As Jacerel opened the door, it was as if he were walking into an even dimmer reflection of the ruined town. In the darkness, there were three figures, humanoid, cloaked so as to completely cover their bodies and faces. There were also holographic screens glowing with images, too many for Jacerel to process, though somewhere he saw an image of spaceships floating over the Boeshane like thunderclouds, and somewhere else, he saw casualty figures. The numbers were high enough to distract him so that it took a moment to realize that he couldn’t move.

One of _them_ turned toward Jacerel. Even though he couldn’t see its face, he could tell the way it was looking at him. It was the same way the Others looked at people: like they weren’t people at all.

“A random factor,” it sighed. Like he was some rubbish the wind had blown in. “And at this stage in the game, too.”

“Surely another corpse wouldn’t make a difference,” another one said. 

“Yes it would. Don’t you remember rule five thousand eighty two? It’s a special rule for invasion games.”

“Every point counts in an invasion game. You know that. I say we make it a discard.”

“If you insist. Let’s check the Bounder circuits, then.”

The darkness opened up, then, showing reflections of other rooms with other _them_ in front of different screens. The reflections seemed to curve away into infinity, like when you stand between two mirrors and look into one. But instead of looking dimmer and less real, as the phantoms in mirrors always did, they seemed more real, somehow. It was as if every trailing hem, every sterile room, every cold sneer Jacerel had ever seen were only shadows of the ones he saw now. Jacerel felt a numb dread at how many of _them_ there were.

“A brief interruption,” one of Jacerel’s _them_ said. “We are about to make a discard to the Bounder circuits. Can we confirm that this move is within the bounds of gameplay?”

“Acceptable,” said a voice that sounded like a computer to Jacerel. “Discard has been added to the Bounds.”

The darkness folded in on itself, then, leaving Jacerel with only the three of _them._ One of _them_ spoke to him, then, speaking in a bored monotone like a sulky child reciting a poem she was forced to memorize.

“You are now a discard. We have no further use for you in play. You are free to walk the Bounds as you please, but it is against the rules for a Homeward Bounder to enter play in any world. To ensure you keep this rule, you will be transferred to another field of play every time a move ends in the field where you are. The rules also state that you are allowed to return Home if you can. If you succeed in returning Home, then you may enter play again in the normal manner.” 

Another of _them_ reached for a spinning holographic control. Jacerel panicked. “Wait, what are you doing?” he cried. “Let me go! Mum and Dad and Gray need me!”

 _They_ paid him no mind. The cloaked hand twisted around the control, and Jacerel was somewhere else.

“Somewhere else” wasn’t enough to describe it. He was on a pile of stones in a desert, the air so dry it felt like all the salt and damp of Boeshane Bay in the summer was sucked off his skin in a matter of moments. 

The stars were wrong. If Jacerel didn’t know better, he would have said he was on another planet. But he did know better, because the difference was more profound than that. Somehow, Jacerel knew that he was in another universe entirely.

There was just something about it. The way gravity pulled on him, maybe. The flow of thirsty air across his face. Or maybe the flesh just knew when it was someplace it was never meant to be. Jacerel could feel it. _They_ had sent him to another world. That’s what _they_ ’d meant. 

Jacerel sat down so hard his bones rattled. Mum. Dad. Gray. _They_ had taken his family away from him. He would never see them again unless he managed to find a way Home. He choked on bitter despair. How was he supposed to do that, when he didn’t even know how _they_ ’d sent him away?

“Take me back!” he screamed to the sky that wasn’t his. “I promise I won’t interrupt your stupid game! I just want to go back!”

There was no answer.

“What are the rules?” Jacerel said, not expecting an answer this time. “You didn’t even tell me the rules.” 

He couldn’t stay. He knew walking wouldn’t take him to the next world, but while he was in this one, he needed water. He didn’t have the slightest idea how to find it, but he certainly wouldn’t have any if he stayed here. He walked until the horizon began to glow green and gold with an alien sun, and still he never found so much as a living plant. He took shelter under a crag of rock and slept.

It was in the desert that Jacerel discovered Rule One: he couldn’t die. 

He went for a week without water and food, long past the point when he should have died of thirst and heat stroke, before a caravan found him. He was delirious and half-dead, but not all the way dead. 

Once he was conscious enough to do anything but drink warm water and writhe with the pain of his sunburns, he thought, _I’m an abomination. A thing that can’t taste the Silence in Between, or the Peace Beyond._

The people who’d rescued him, swathed in headwraps and flowing robes, spoke to him in soothing tones, in a language Jacerel had never heard. The translator chip he had installed in school took longer to get going than it ever had before. It was a whole day of gibberish before he understood what they were saying.

 _Miracle child,_ they called him. A foundling the desert had chosen to spare. Jacerel wanted to laugh. The desert had nothing to do with it. They were all pieces in the same game. Jacerel just had to play by different rules.

They were kind to him, though. He was the only young person in the caravan. They dressed him in a flowing sea-dark robe and a white headwrap to cover his hair and neck. He had to admit, looking at himself in a polished tray, that he looked good.

He felt bad, a little, when he had to leave.

The call came one night as he lay in his tent, turning restlessly in his bedroll with nightmares of the Others coming for Gray. It was a yearning in his chest, a hook just behind his sternum pulling him away, away. There was no use ignoring it, and anyway, Jacerel didn’t want to. If _they_ were calling him, that meant they were going to send him to another world, and he could learn how the journey was made.

Jacerel put on his robe and his shoes and took a skin of water. He snuck out of the encampment and followed the pull until morning. He realized, looking at the unfamiliar shapes of the stars, that he was going back to where he had started. He slept through the heat of the day, his robe pulled up over his face, dreaming of a voice hidden in his heartbeat telling him where to go.

The sun set, and it wasn’t long before Jacerel was back at the pile of rocks where he’d first landed. He stood on the topmost rock, and the pull took him.

* * *

The next thing Jacerel knew, he was in a dark, close alley, and the air stank.

It didn’t stink like the air did when the Others attacked. It smelled like nothing Jacerel had known before, like too many animals close together and rotting fruit and human waste all at once. For a long time, he coughed and gagged, eyes watering so hard he could barely see. 

Slowly, Jacerel’s senses returned to him. He looked up and saw a symbol etched into the soot-streaked wall opposite him. He couldn’t make any sense of it. To his left, the alley retreated into dimness. To his right, there was a busy street, filled with the sounds of shouts and rolling cartwheels. He looked down. His empty waterskin was gone. All he had were his robe and shoes.

“Pssst!” came a voice from the dark end of the alley.

Jacerel edged toward the voice. His eyes adjusted, and he saw a boy and girl about his own age, both much dirtier than he was. They both had nearly black skin, but the girl was nearly bald while the boy had a mass of springy curls on his head. The boy spoke to him. Again, he understood nothing. Jacerel’s head ached at the prospect of going a day in this awful city without knowing the language. He shook his head. The boy kept trying to talk, until finally the girl tugged at his ragged sleeve and seemed to explain to him that he wasn’t going to be able to communicate.

“Bo,” the girl said, pointing to herself.

“Bo,” Jacerel repeated, giving her a little bow.

“Kip,” she said, pointing to the boy. Kip nodded.

“Jacerel,” he said, pointing to himself.

“Jaza, za, zurel,” said Bo, struggling with the name.

“Jass-uh-rull,” Jacerel said slowly.

“Jack,” Kip said, pointing to him.

“Jack,” Bo agreed. 

“Fine, then. Jack.” He pointed to the street. “Shall we go?”

Bo gasped and pulled him away from the street. Kip hissed a word that Jacerel was willing to bet meant “no.”

Bo and Kip couldn’t explain to him why he couldn’t go into the street, of course, but they looked like survivors, and Jacerel had nothing but the clothes on his back and his wits, so he’d do well to learn from the locals. He didn’t try leaving the alley again. Kip brought out a chipped set of wooden marbles, and he watched Bo and Kip play until he figured out how to join in. They played until the sun came down.

At sunset, Bo and Kip led Jacerel out of the alley, through a network of filthy streets, until the mud and brick buildings thinned out. They were at an oxbow lake at the curve of a river, where ships floated out from a brightly lit harbor. There were other children at the lake already. Those who weren’t bathing already were stripping off their clothes. Jacerel didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t an ocean, but he missed the water. He rinsed himself clean and had a splash fight with Kip and Bo.

When they emerged from the lake, shivering a little, there was a fire lit on the bank. There was a man tending the fire, tall and pale with a mess of spiky brown hair, his thin frame lost in a long brown coat. He had a basket of bread and another of cured meat. Jacerel realized he was starving.

Everyone gathered around the fire. The man passed around bread and meat, taking care to distribute it fairly. Each child murmured a phrase ending in the word “Harkness” when they received the food. It took Jacerel a while to realize that the word was the man’s name. When Harkness came to him, he gave Jacerel a long, considering look with brown eyes that seemed too old for his face. He seemed like he was about to say something, but instead he just smiled a little and gave Jacerel his dinner.

Harkness told them stories. Jacerel couldn’t understand them, but he could tell they were stories, from the lilt in his voice and the way the kids leaned in to listen. At the end, when the youngest were nodding off, he said, “The slavers have all hauled anchor from Vikramantown Harbor. You’re safe to walk the streets,” and just like that, Jacerel understood his words.

So that was why Bo and Kip wouldn’t let him out of the alley. “Thank you,” he told them. “For stopping me from doing something stupid.”

“Jack! You remember how to speak!” Bo said

“Sorry,” said Jacerel. “I was… out of it.”

Kip smiled. “It’s OK. Even if you never remembered how to speak, I would have liked you. You’re good at marbles.”

The kids were bedding down on the lakeshore, sleeping in pairs back-to-back to keep warm. Jacerel tapped Bo on the shoulder. “Can I sleep with you?”

“You can’t do that!” Bo gasped.

“Why not?”

“Because she’s a _girl_ ,” Kip said.

“So?”

“Boys can’t sleep with girls,” Bo said. “Stuff might happen.”

Jacerel wanted to ask what terrible things would happen if boys and girls slept together, but Bo was already looking at him like he was possibly dangerous, so he kept his mouth shut. “Can I sleep with you then, Kip?”

“Sure,” said Kip. With an apologetic smile to his friend, he led Jacerel away from Bo and curled up on the ground like a leaf folding up in autumn. Jacerel spooned up behind him, his nose filling with the lake-water smell of Kip’s hair. Kip gave a surprised little jerk at the contact.

“Sorry,” said Jacerel. “Would you rather we slept back to back?”

“No, it’s fine,” said Kip. “It’s warmer this way, actually.”

Jacerel found himself adopted by Harkness, and by Bo and Kip too, in a way. At night, Harkness fed the street kids of Vikramantown and warmed them by his fire. By day, Bo and Kip taught Jacerel how to steal. He took to it quickly, and found he didn’t feel bad about it. It was just a way to survive until he made it Home, after all. And when he did get Home, it might turn out his family needed a thief.

Bo was good at pickpocketing, her fingers so light you couldn’t feel them even when you knew they were there. Kip stole from street vendors when they didn’t watch their wares closely enough. Jacerel had a different gift. Bo liked to say, “Jack, you’ve got honey on your tongue.” He could distract people with his words from what he was really doing. When he smiled just right, people gave him what he wanted before he even had to ask. 

The second day on that world, Jacerel tried to tell Bo about being a Homeward Bounder. She looked at him solemnly and said, “That is a great sin you carry. You must have done something terrible.” When Jack protested that he’d done nothing to deserve this, she said, “Our actions all come back to us eventually,” and didn’t seem to understand what he was really saying. Jacerel didn’t bring it up with anyone else after that. He couldn’t stand listening to someone else saying he’d done something wrong without really hearing his story.

A couple weeks later, Kip and Jacerel were bedded down at the outer edge of the lakeshore, in the hollow between the roots of a gnarled, soot-black tree. Jacerel had his arms wrapped around Kip to keep him warm. He thought about how Kip’s hipbones felt beneath his hands and the scent of his neck. Kip woke up, pressed back against Jacerel, and felt the evidence of what he’d been thinking about. He said, “Jack, uh…”

“I can turn around if you like, or sleep somewhere else,” Jacerel said amiably. “Or, if you like, you could do something about it…”

Kip spun around. Even in the darkness, Jacerel could see the tension in his face. “Do something about it? What does that mean?”

Jacerel pulled back. “I’m sorry, Kip. I’ll go sleep somewhere else.”

“First you want to sleep with Bo, and now _this_? Do you think we’re perverts or something? Is that it?” Kip spat.

Jacerel’s translator chip was having trouble with the word “pervert.” The closest equivalent it could provide in his native tongue was _aish’ye_ , referring to twisted people who desired the touch of things that couldn’t say yes, like animals or children. Jacerel wasn’t like that. “I’m not a pervert. I didn’t mean to force you into anything you didn’t want. I just liked sleeping together and I thought you might want – “

Kip got to his knees and punched Jacerel in the nose. “I don’t want anything like that, do you understand me? Don’t you dare go around saying I’m a pervert like you.”

That was when Jacerel discovered Rule Two.

Kip gave an agonized cry and fell on his side. His nose still bleeding freely, Jacerel struggled up to his knees. For a moment he didn’t understand what was happening. Then he saw the snake pumping venom into Kip’s leg.

Snakes didn’t bother you unless you bothered them first. That’s the way it worked on the Boe. Jacerel didn’t think it was any different with snakes here. Kip had been hurting Jacerel, and the snake had stopped him.

Harkness appeared, drawn by the sound of shouts. “Snakebite,” Jacerel gasped out through numb lips. Without another word, Harkness bent down and started sucking the venom out, spitting bloody mouthfuls over his shoulder while Kip trembled and whimpered. Jacerel rummaged in his pack and lifted a canteen of water to Kip’s mouth. He turned his head aside. Jacerel pressed his lips together in frustration and offered the canteen to Harkness instead. He poured water on his mouth so he could rinse away the blood, then offered it to Kip. He drank.

“This is my fault,” Jacerel whispered. If he hadn’t been a Homeward Bounder, this wouldn’t have happened. Of that he was sure.

“No, it isn’t,” Harkness said. “You did nothing wrong.”

“Then why didn’t he take water from me?”

“I see the way you look at him,” Harkness said. “I can also see you’re not from around here. People don’t love so freely, in this place.”

Yes, Jacerel could see that now. He wondered if the symbol in the alley had been a warning. Maybe another Homeward Bounder had been here before, and heard people talk about _perverts_ , and left a sign for the next traveler to pass through.

Assuming there were other Homeward Bounders at all.

“Thank you,” Jacerel blurted to Harkness, “for being so kind.” Then he ran back to the alley full tilt, hurtling along the dark street. “If I’d known the rules, Kip wouldn’t have gotten hurt,” he whispered. “Get me out of here. Get me out. I can’t stay.”

Jacerel felt a rushing sensation as he drew near the alley. It was the first time he’d felt anything near a transition place. This was what it felt like to slip between worlds.

With his next breath, he was gone.

* * *

In the next world, when a concerned woman in a crisp white coat asked him for his name, he said, “Jack Harkness.”

* * *

It was on the seventieth world that Jack Harkness met the Doctor.

It was summer, and there was revolution in the Floating City. Jack knew because the air smelled like gunpowder and blood. 

Jack followed the twin smells to a plaza where a battle had raged between the government and the rebels. The rebels had won. Lucky for him, because the people who died for the government always had more to steal. He snuck into the plaza, wary of government forces coming to reclaim the ground they’d lost. He spotted a bright gleam among the corpses and followed it to the cold hand of a uniformed officer. A ring, platinum. Perfect. He’d be able to exchange it on any world, for one of the many things Jack had learned about the people of the multiverse was that most of them loved shiny metals.

Jack looked up and saw a man leaning out of a first story window. He was tall and spare in a battered leather jacket, and he stared at Jack with piercing blue eyes. Jack knew then, with the same certainty with which he knew this world was not his own, that the man was another Homeward Bounder.

“Come here,” the man said. 

Suddenly, inexplicably, Jack felt ashamed. He went to the door next to the window and opened it. The flat smelled like smoke; when its habitants left, they must have left the cook-fire burning. The other Homeward Bounder stood framed in the square of light coming in from the window. “Follow me,” he said, and started up a narrow flight of stairs.

Jack was helpless to resist. The man was magnetic, and it wasn’t just because Jack was so curious to meet another Homeward Bounder. It was as if the man were a world in himself, a world that Jack actually wanted to explore. He climbed the stairs.

After a few flights, Jack emerged on the roof of the building. He could see the whole neighborhood from up here. There was a tide of people moving north along a main boulevard. The strange man wasn’t watching them. Instead, he inspected a ramshackle building with a tall chimney on a newly abandoned street. “That’s an alchemist’s lab,” he said. “There’ll be dangerous equipment in there. Could have explosions or chemical spills with no one there to mind the shop.”

“What does it matter? The fighting will probably turn this whole sector to rubble anyway.”

“And then someone goes back to pick through the ruins of her home, and steps on a bomb.”

“That’s what happens,” Jack said flatly.

“That’s what happens, eh? Is that what you always say when people die for no reason?”

“You have no right to talk to me like that,” Jack said. “I’ve seen too many people die. I should have died at least a dozen times myself. There’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just trying to get Home. Who do you think you are?”

The man became suddenly gentle, his expression softer than any Jack would have thought that angular face could make. “’M sorry, lad. I’ll get you away from all of this. I’m the Doctor.”

Jack just stared at the Doctor’s extended hand. “I’m not a lad.” He looked like the same fourteen year old he’d been when he was first sent away from Home, but he’d been wandering the Bounder circuits for twenty years. “My name is Jack Harkness.”

“I’m sorry, then, Jack.”

Jack hesitated, then shook the Doctor’s hand.

“I’m going to do something about that lab. You can come with me if you like, or stay in this building and I’ll come back for you.”

“Can you do that?” Jack said, surprised.

“Do what?”

“Go in and stop that lab from exploding. Didn’t _they_ remove us from play? That would be interfering.”

The Doctor beamed at him. “Yes. Yes, it would.”

“ _They_ won’t punish you for it?”

“The worst _they_ can do is send me on to another world.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve been doing this for a thousand years and more.”

Jack looked into his eyes, and believed it. “I’ve never saved anyone before. I’m not sure I can _care_ enough.” He swept his arms around him. “This is just another prison _they_ ’re keeping me in. I want to go Home.”

“So do I,” the Doctor said. “I miss it every day. But if even they – “ The Doctor pointed at the corpses layered in the street, eyes flashing – “are just pieces in _their_ game, I’d still like to be the random factor that ruins the _fun_.”

Jack felt a little thrill up his spine. Some part of him that had given up on getting Home took to this idea like the warmth of a fire. Even if he couldn’t win the game, he could spit in the face of _them_ who played it. “OK. Take me with you,” he said.

The Doctor smiled at him. “Good.” He dashed down the stairs, and Jack hastened to follow. They skirted the bloody streets, ducking through archways and empty plazas until they reached the alchemist’s lab. Even from outside, Jack could smell hot petrol and an acrid, chemical tang.

The alchemist hadn’t bothered to lock the door when he fled. The Doctor and Jack walked in. The chemical smell grew stronger. In the closeness of the lab, Jack’s skin began to prickle with sweat beneath his tunic. The Doctor didn’t seem to notice the heat, even in his leather jacket. 

“Anything you can easily snuff out or turn off, do it,” the Doctor said. “If you think there’s even a chance you might hurt yourself doing it, don’t.”

“I know a thing or two about machines,” Jack said belligerently. Then he felt bad for speaking that way when the Doctor was just trying to protect him. Not many people had tried to protect him since he was torn away from Home. “But I’ll be careful.”

He found a cauldron of what smelled like industrial chemicals bubbling over a flame. Jack cut off the gas line that fed the flame. Further on was an elaborate gear mechanism with its cogs still turning. Jack went to the controls. He couldn’t read the labels – written language always took his translator chip longer to decipher – but he observed the ways the controls linked up to the gears and pulled the biggest lever. The mechanism ground to a halt.

Somewhere above him, Jack heard a buzzing sound, like a mechanical insect, then felt a shudder through the whole building. “Run!” the Doctor cried, hurtling across a gantry above Jack’s head. 

Some part of Jack wanted to wait for the Doctor, to be sure he’d be all right. He told himself he was being silly. It wasn’t like a Homeward Bounder could die anyway. He ran out and waited in the street for the Doctor to follow. The building shuddered again, and Jack felt his heart rise into his throat despite himself. _I shouldn’t care,_ he thought desperately. _Getting Home is the only thing that matters. Everything else is a distraction._

But he needed the distraction so badly. 

Something crumbled inside the building. The Doctor ran out, his left side covered in brick dust, grinning like a madman. He took Jack’s hand and ran down the street. Jack was forced to match his strides to keep up as best he could. When they reached the end of the street, the ground rumbled, and the building collapsed in on itself.

“There,” the Doctor said. “Can’t fall in on anyone if it’s already fallen in.”

“What now?” Jack said. He realized he was still holding the Doctor’s hand, and self-consciously pulled away. 

“What do you want to do?” the Doctor asked.

Jack had a sense that with the Doctor at his side, he could do anything. The thought was too dizzying to hold. “I don’t know.”

“What do you usually do when you come to a new world?”

“Survive,” Jack said in a small voice.

The Doctor looked at him, eyes sad. “Well, I’m going to make sure you survive just fine, so there’s no need to concern yourself with that.”

“What do you do when you come to a new world?” Jack said.

The Doctor grinned. “Explore.”

Jack managed a smile back. “OK. I’ll try that.”

The Doctor led them away from that place of death. Most people were headed toward the heart of the city, but the Doctor went to the outskirts, until they came to a park with nothing beyond it but sky.

Jack stopped and stared at the clouds drifting beyond the hedges and lawns. “Is that the edge?”

The Doctor smiled in answer. He walked past a curlicue hedge and a stand of trees that looked like tentacles frozen mid-grasp. They came to a wall about the height of the Doctor’s collarbone. He hoisted himself up, then helped Jack do the same. 

Beyond the wall was a world. Not a tiny slice of one, which was all Jack ever saw of them, but a _whole_ world spread out beneath them. There were railroads and farmland and a gaping pit mine.

“There’s so much of it,” said Jack. “But it’s so small.”

“All worlds are like that,” the Doctor said. “Even your Home.”

“Not Home,” Jack said with feeling. “That’s so much bigger than this. It’s _everything._ ”

The Doctor didn’t disagree.

“It’s beautiful, though,” Jack said. “How does the Floating City stay up like this?”

“Magic,” the Doctor said with distaste.

Jack knew how the Doctor felt. He didn’t like magic either. He couldn’t understand it, and it reminded him how alien the worlds really were. “Do all worlds have something like this? Something beautiful?”

“Not all, lad. But most.” A pause. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be calling you that.”

Jack hesitated, then said, “No, it’s OK. You can call me ‘lad.’”

The Doctor ruffled Jack’s hair. “All right, then, lad. Let’s find us something to eat.”

* * *

On the next world, Jack and the Doctor were sitting at a fire in a vast pine forest, eating something like a rabbit that the Doctor had caught and Jack had skinned and gutted. The night was cold, but they would take turns sleeping so the other could tend the fire.

Jack licked the last of the grease from his fingers and stared into the flickering dance of the flames. “You’ve been doing this for a long time…” he began.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows for Jack to continue. His face looked like an ancient mask in the orange glow of the fire.

“So maybe you know. Is it my fault I’m a Homeward Bounder?”

“What makes you think that, lad?” the Doctor said softly.

Jack stared at the fire instead of the Doctor’s face. “Whenever I try to tell someone about it, they tell me I’ve sinned.”

“Do you think you’ve sinned?”

“Where I come from, we don’t have sin. We’re all supposed to honor the dead and dying and help them pass through, but no one gets angry if you don’t do your duty. They step up and help. It took me the longest time to figure out what sin even was. But when I did, I couldn’t help but wonder.”

“It’s not your fault. Don’t ever think that.”

“If it’s not my fault, then why do _they_ do this to us?”

“Because _they_ need us.”

Jack just stared. There was nothing the Doctor could have said that would have surprised him more. _They_ had treated him like an inconvenient stain when he’d stumbled upon _their_ game. How could _they_ need him?

“You’re asking the wrong question,” the Doctor said. “The right question for you, but the wrong question for _them_. The question that matters to _them_ is this: where do _they_ get their power from?”

“I’ve never really thought about that,” Jack admitted. “I thought maybe they were the dead. Vengeful dead that weren’t cared for by the living, and got their revenge by controlling us. But after all I’ve seen, all the – I don’t think there’s anything after death, after all. We were all just lying to ourselves to make it easier to bear.”

The Doctor’s brow lowered, but he didn’t contradict Jack. “ _They_ are regular sentient beings, just like you. There’s only one thing different: _they_ learned about the multiverse first. _They_ discovered the Bounds and how they work. And _they_ discovered what keeps all the worlds in existence. Have you noticed anything the worlds have got in common?”

“I can breathe the air and eat the food on all of them,” Jack offered.

“That’s because _they_ left you on a circuit of Bounds that lead to places with compatible biospheres,” said the Doctor. “If _they_ sent you on a truly random circuit, you’d be choking or freezing or starving to death nearly all the time, and that doesn’t suit _their_ purpose. What they’ve got in common is that all of them have sentient life. That’s no accident. The multiverse exists because of belief. Sentient beings believe a world is real, and so it is. Worlds that don’t ever evolve sentient life shrivel up into nothingness.”

“So _they_ came up with a plan. _They_ found a world, killed off all the sentient life there, and turned it into a paradise for themselves. _They_ believed in this place. _They_ decided it was more perfect than any other world, because _they_ made it in _their_ image. And because _they_ believed in _their_ world, and _they_ disbelieved in all the others, _their_ world became more real than all the rest. That’s what gave _them_ power over the worlds, and let _them_ turn the multiverse into a game for _their_ amusement.”

“What does that have to do with…” Jack trailed off as he thought about the last world, when he’d been stripping the corpses of the fallen in the streets of the Floating City. He hadn’t felt anything at all, though what he’d done would be considered the worst kind of disrespect to the dead, back on the Boe. It hadn’t been real to him. No world was. All the people he met were like characters in a holo-dream: he knew them, briefly, and then they were gone. The only thing that was real to him was Home. “Oh.”

“ _They_ need the Homeward Bounders,” the Doctor repeated. “We know about all the worlds, but because of the way _they_ used us, the only one that feels real is Home. So we maintain _their_ disbelief, and _their_ power.”

Jack stared glumly into the fire. “What if we believed in other worlds? Wouldn’t that it mess it all up for _them_?”

“If you work out how to do that, lad, let me know. I’ve been trying for centuries.”

Jack looked at the Doctor sidelong. “How do you know so much about _them_?”

“I used to be one of _them_.”

Jack gaped at him, then recoiled. “You – you did this to me!”

“No,” the Doctor said heavily. “I didn’t. I refused to play _their_ game. I tried to stop _them_. That’s why I’m Homeward Bound like you.”

“I don’t understand,” said Jack, edging away from the Doctor a little farther.

“In my world, I was a traveler,” said the Doctor. “I explored the universe. Met people. Had adventures. Along the way, I discovered the Bounds. So I traveled along one. Turns out there’s one world where most of the Bounds go. When I got there, I found a village on the Boundary. A whole community of explorers, scientists, and geniuses from all over the multiverse who’d discovered how to travel among the worlds. I was delighted. I thought I’d found my sort of people.”

“So I joined them, hoping to learn all there was to know about the Bounds and the multiverse. I mapped some of them out. But most of the others weren’t like me. They wanted to know how they could use the Bounds for their own ends. That sort united in one front to make their little _paradise_. _They_ told the rest of us we could either join them or go back to our own worlds. Most of us went Home. A few of us fought. We lost. Far as I know, I’m the only survivor.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack said.

“I’m not. I did what was right, and I paid the price for it. You didn’t even get that choice.”

“I’m not sure I could have done what you did,” Jack admitted. “You saw – I’m not a very good person.”

The Doctor studied him. “You’re the one who gets to decide that.”

The weight of responsibility was crushing. Jack was supposed to be focused on getting Home, and now he was worrying about whether he was a good person or not. Then again, did he want to come home only for his family to find that he’d turned into a monster?

Jack felt himself settle into the decision. When he looked up, he saw the corners of the Doctor’s mouth turned up ever so slightly. The expression was tender. Caring. No one had looked at him that way since he’d been wrenched away from Home. 

The Doctor took off his leather jacket. He looked strangely naked without it. “Sleep on this for tonight.”

“Won’t you be cold?”

“This isn’t cold. Not for me.” 

Jack wanted to protest, but when he curled up in the homey, earthy scent of leather, he found that he couldn’t.

* * *

The Doctor taught Jack the secrets of the Bounds. He showed Jack which Bounds took him along a chain of similar worlds, which Bounds led in a circle, and which Bounds were random. He taught Jack the language of symbols that Homeward Bounders left at Boundaries as signals to each other, like FRIENDLY or GOOD CLIMATE or CANNIBALS. Jack suggested a few more symbols that could be useful, like YOU’RE ONLY ALLOWED TO HAVE SEX IF IT’S THE BABY-MAKING KIND.

It was so much _better,_ traveling with the Doctor. It wasn’t just because the Doctor knew so much about the Bounds, or because Jack didn’t have to rob graves or steal to get by. The Doctor had an instinct for excitement and beauty and pulse-pounding danger, the three all too often indistinguishable from one another. One moment he’d be taking Jack up a crystal mountain, the next there’d be an avalanche, and the next, they’d be rescuing people buried by the silver snow. 

Jack found things in himself he didn’t know he had. While the Doctor was digging people out of the snow, he led them away in case another avalanche came. When the Doctor was repairing the life support systems in an underwater castle with his sonic screwdriver, Jack questioned and pushed all the guards in the castle until he found all the tools the Doctor needed to finish the repairs. 

Jack wasn’t a scared little boy anymore. He didn’t have to be a coward. The Doctor had freed him from that. And if the Doctor sometimes looked at Jack, and the aching loneliness on his too-old face lightened just a little – well, that was just a bonus.

One night, as they sat in an inn by the fireside, sipping hot mulled drinks from flagons and listening to low thrumming music from downstairs, Jack said, “I promise I’ll stay with you.”

The Doctor looked at him, startled.

“Until I get Home,” Jack explained. “I – I think it’s better if you’re not alone. So until this is all over for me, I’ll make sure you aren’t.”

The Doctor didn’t quite smile, but he went soft around the eyes in a way Jack had grown to love. “Thank you, lad.”

* * *

When it began, the Doctor took note of it only as a vague feeling. A world would feel indefinably familiar, even though the Doctor knew he had never been there before. Jack would point out something about the night sky or the smell of the air, and something inside him _itched_.

Then he really started to notice, on a conscious level. For the first time in over a millennium, the flow of time began to pulse in a more familiar rhythm. The rotations of the planets and galaxies settled into the paths he’d always known. The first few times, he didn’t dare let himself hope. But when they took another SIMILAR Bound and the Doctor spotted the familiar shape of Kasterborous in the sky, he knew it had to be true.

He was getting close to Home.

He never thought the time would come so soon, but now that it had, all the old fantasies came roaring back. The feeling of red grass bending beneath his toes. Romana, embracing him, smiling. Koschei, ready to forgive and be forgiven. The TARDIS, welcoming him with open doors.

They came to a world with many of Gallifrey’s worse aspects and none of its best. A fussy woman in elaborate robes saw the Doctor and Jack sitting together in a railcar and demanded proof that he was the lad’s legal guardian. They exchanged a look and ran to the back of the railcar, jumping out to the nearest platform, but this world was too high-tech for a maneuver like that to throw off the authorities. They took Jack away to be registered and enrolled in a school.

Jack gave the Doctor a helpless look as the police frog-marched him off. This had happened to them before, on highly regimented worlds like this one. Jack couldn’t resist too much, or what he called “Rule Two” would kick in, and anyone who tried to stop him would die. They would have to find him a way out that wouldn’t get anyone killed.

The Doctor went into a police station and discreetly used his sonic screwdriver to get into the database. A Jack Harkness had just been taken into Twelfth Precinct, with assignment to Sparkling Merits Correctional Boarding School, located in low orbit around the planet. The Doctor scowled. 

He was waiting none too patiently at the station for the next hopper into low orbit to arrive when he felt the Bounds calling, plucking insistently at his chest. He never knew in advance when they would call, even in all his centuries Homeward Bound, but he wasn’t sure the call had ever come at a worse time. 

He looked at the orange sky, felt the thrum of time along his skin, and knew he was probably a single trip on the SIMILAR Bound away from Gallifrey. If he took the next hopper, the call would orient on the nearest Bound to the orbital station. That Bound could lead anywhere. He would miss his chance. 

Some part of him insisted that he could run up, get Jack, and come back down before the call from the Bounds became too strong to resist. But what then? He couldn’t take Jack to Gallifrey. The Doctor missed Home, but he had no illusions about his fellow Time Lords. There was no telling what they’d do to a human who breached their inner sanctum. 

_He’d want this,_ the Doctor told himself. _He said he’d stay with me until I made it Home. Well, the time’s come._

He left the launch station and followed the call that snared him behind the ribs. It should have been easy to walk to the Boundary. Everything in his body was screaming at him to do it. But it felt as if he moved through molasses.

The Boundary was a little park wedged between two skyscrapers. The Doctor paused by a tree, and took out his sonic screwdriver to etch a symbol into the bark. He had never seen it before, but another Homeward Bounder, the Flying Dutchman, had taught it to him. It was the symbol a Homeward Bounder left to show that he had made it Home.

His message delivered, The Doctor walked along the Bound and surrendered to the journey.

* * *

Jack stared at the controls of the emergency hopper and fought down rising panic.

The call of the Bounds was like a scream in his chest trying to claw its way into his throat. It pulled him toward a Boundary in space, not far back along the orbital station’s path. He would have to fight it to get back to the Boundary on the surface. But he had to do it, because if he and the Doctor didn’t travel together, the Bounds would take them to different worlds, and they’d both be alone again.

Jack had managed to sneak out of that awful school and break into an emergency hopper on the station. He’d never piloted a spaceship by himself before. But he’d helped the Doctor do it. He just hoped he’d learned enough.

He engaged the emergency override for all security measures, and had the computer plot a safe course to the city he’d launched from. The engines roared to life, and he was free of the orbital station. 

A blank spot in space pulled him like a magnet, but he ignored it. He had to reach the Boundary on the surface. He felt everything in his body rattle and shear as he plunged through the atmosphere.

The parachute engaged, and the hopper landed in the lake beside the city. Jack opened the hatch and struck out for shore with all the speed and assurance of a boy who had learned to swim almost before he could walk. He didn’t remember where the Boundary was, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t sure he could have moved in any direction but toward it even if he’d wanted to.

He ran through the bustling downtown, knowing how out of place he looked in a dripping, muddy school uniform and not caring. When he saw the park, he put on a burst of speed and leapt clear over the fence. 

The Doctor wasn’t there.

Jack fell to his knees. He’d been so sure the Doctor would be waiting for him. Jack had never doubted him.

The last thing he saw before the Bound took him was the symbol etched into the bark of a tree: HOME.

* * *

_Home._

That was the first thing the Doctor knew. The second came hard on the heels of the first.

_Grief. Loss. Pain._

The TARDIS. Why was she hurting? 

He fell to his knees. Beneath them, rock. An asteroid. Spinning in orbit around –

He opened his eyes. All around him, silver devastation.

“What?”

A sound, like desperate breaths in and out. A sound he’d longed to hear for over a thousand years. And then, the empty spaces that had been torn open when he’d left her, were suddenly, achingly full –

With a song of mourning.

He stumbled in through open doors to a smoking ruin. Her heart, laid bare, screaming.

They were gone. All of them, gone. And the universe that had once been Home became as empty to him as all the rest.

* * *

Jack tried to be happy for the Doctor. After all that time on the Bounds, the Doctor had finally made it Home. He was free.

But Jack couldn’t help but feel betrayed. He would have liked to see the Doctor’s Home. More than anything, he would have liked to have the chance to say goodbye.

Soon after the Doctor left him, Jack hit a circuit of free-spirited worlds, all carnivals and philosophical hedonism and free love. He let himself get lost in it. The Doctor wouldn’t let him flirt when they were together just because he looked fourteen, even though fourteen was old enough on his world as long as you didn’t go for anyone a lot older or more powerful. 

He knew enough about the Bounds that he could stay on this circuit forever if he wanted to, but he knew it would become empty with time, as everything did, except for Home and the Doctor. So he stayed there for two years, then moved on.

Two worlds later, he was on an island with a tsunami fast approaching. He watched the chaos all around him and thought of what the Doctor would do if he were here. He would organize an evacuation, send a message to the mainland, keep everyone moving and hoping. That was when he realized there was no reason he couldn’t do that too.

Well, there was a difference. None of the adults listened to him, like they always did to the Doctor, until Jack fixed a broken engine on one of the hoverboats. Then he had people asking him for help, and other people asking if they could help him. He sent some of them out to get tools and parts, wishing secretly in his heart that the Doctor were here with his sonic screwdriver, and fixed the boat of anyone who asked.

When they got to the mainland, the islanders tried to make him into a boy hero. He enjoyed the attention while it lasted, staying with the refugees in their humble new homes. When the Bounds called to him again, he slipped away in the night, and supposed they would miss him when they found him gone. 

Whatever the Doctor had done to him, it was permanent. When he saw suffering, he couldn’t just turn away anymore. He had to do something, even when he would have been better off keeping to the shadows, as he had before. He couldn’t fight other people, or even put himself in a situation where anyone might want to hurt him, because then Rule Two would kick in, and Jack couldn’t bring himself to exploit for his own ends the rules that kept him bound. Using the rules came dangerously close to accepting them.

It wasn’t hard to notice, when Jack’s time came. He found himself on remote colony planets, all newly terraformed frontier. When people told him about politics and history, the stories sounded more and more familiar. After all this time, Jack felt an anger roaring back that he hadn’t let himself feel in years. The Doctor must have known in advance that he was getting close to Home, as Jack did now, and he hadn’t said a word.

Excitement and dread built in equal measure. He longed to see the Boe again, to see his family again and help protect them from the Others. He could protect them better now, with everything he knew. But he was afraid. He had been away for forty years, at least from his perspective. He was not the same boy who had left home, looking for shelter from the bombs, and there was no way he could explain what he had been through. 

When he did come Home, the first way he knew, besides the bone-deep conviction in his bones, was the taste of the air: sea salt, smoke, sulfur, and a hint of burning plastic. When he exhaled, his breath steamed in the cold.

He realized he was standing at the gate to the House of the Dead – or what had been a House of the Dead, before _they_ had taken over. _They_ were still there. He had to get away. So he ran from the ruins of the town and didn’t look back.

It was only when the town with its Boundary was just a smudge on the horizon, and Jack’s lungs burned from gasping in cold air, that he remembered that it had been summer when he left Home.

He took a moment, just enough time to catch his breath, but not enough to let himself think. Then he ran the rest of the way home, stopping only to drink from creeks and wells.

He could smell the ruin that had once been his neighborhood before he really saw it. There was no deluding himself about what the stink of burning trash and explosives meant. He knelt in the ashes of his home anyway, searching for any sign that his family had made it out alive. Flesh and bone would have been instantly incinerated, but he found twisted scraps of metal and plastic that were once a Net uplink, a skimboat – things his family wouldn’t have left behind unless the need was dire. Try as he might, he could read no more augury in the entrails of his former life.

When he looked along the shore, he saw that the next neighborhood over, if not intact, still had signs of life. It was the neighborhood where his best friend, Camsin, lived. He didn’t run this time. He walked slowly, letting the white noise of waves against sand fill his mind, leaving room for nothing else.

The first person to see him was an old woman with a face like leather. She nearly fell off the roof she was mending when she saw him. “Whispers from Beyond,” she said, letting roof tiles fall from her hands. “That’s never Jacerel.”

He couldn’t remember the woman’s name. The details of his life on the Boe had faded over forty years, however hard he tried to keep them fresh. “You’ve made no mistake, Old Mother. I’m here looking for Camsin.”

The woman climbed down a rickety ladder, took him by the shoulders, looked into his eyes as if to be sure he wasn’t an echo from Beyond. “Oh, Jacerel. If only – your poor dear parents died thinking they’d failed you, if only they’d – _oh._ ”

He shouldn’t have been surprised. He should have known the moment he’d seen his house in ashes. But it still crushed him like a vise, and he trembled in the woman’s arms as she embraced him, uttering tiny sounds of pain like an injured animal. When he found his voice again, he whispered, “Where’s Gray?” and steeled himself for the answer.

“He got away, somehow,” said the woman, a stranger to Jack who knew him so well. “I saw him run. But there’s been no sign of him since.”

“I’ll find Gray,” Jack said. He had searched for Home across the multiverse and found it; surely he could find Home within this one world. “Show me where Camsin is.”

The woman led him to a tent made of scorched carpet. “Camsin!” she cried. “I have Jacerel here!”

The carpets parted, and Camsin came forth and stared. The woman backed away to give them privacy. “Jacerel,” he said. “I stood vigil at the House of the Dead for you.”

Jack’s mouth worked, but no sound came.

“I stood there with your parents and Gray, and the death-speakers said you never whispered back, but we thought that meant you’d moved Beyond their hearing…”

“How long has it been?” Jack asked.

“The attack was a moon-turn ago,” said Camsin. “Where have you _been_? And those clothes you’re wearing – you must be freezing!”

Jack looked down at himself. It had been summer in the last world, and he was in a loose wrapshirt and sarong. His fingernails, he noticed distantly, were tinged blue. “Who covers the most ground here? Who knows the most about what’s going on?”

Camsin blinked. “Well, the soldiers, of course.”

Jack felt his face stretch into a rictus of a grin. “And they fight the Others?”

“The only thing standing between us and them,” Camsin confirmed. 

Jack bared his teeth. “What do you say? Want to stick it to the Others?”

“Jacerel, they only take volunteers sixteen years and up.”

“We’re close enough. And they’ve got to be short on people. They won’t ask too many questions. Will you come with me?”

“I’ll take you to the recruit camp,” Camsin said, “and we’ll see.”

When Camsin saw the daily pay, he was quick to sign up with Jack. He had survived the attack, but his life was about all he had left. 

Jack had never fought in a war before, but he had led people through countless disasters on countless worlds. The only difference this time was that he, too, could hurt and kill. After his first patrol, Camsin had stared at him as if he had the blood of the Others he’d killed on his mouth and hands. “Jacerel,” he’d whispered. “You’re scaring me.”

Jack made a good soldier. Gentle Camsin didn’t. He died on their second patrol. 

As Jack stood vigil for his friend at the House of the Dead, he realized that Gray was now the only thing left in this universe that made it any kind of Home. Jack had no one to blame for that but himself.

In all his patrols, Jack never found his brother. When he asked around, he heard a rumor that the Others sometimes captured children who escaped a raid. But Jack’s unit didn’t do rescue missions, and Jack’s brain screamed at him that he was going to be too late _._ His body was aging here, as it never had in his wanderings among the worlds, and one day it would give out, and he would be _too late_.

So when the Time Agency came to recruit him away from the army, Jack went along willingly. If he learned to travel through time, then he couldn’t be too late for Gray.

He didn’t do detours on his missions at first. He garnered a reputation as a model Time Agent, and only then did he take side trips. He learned where the Others kept their prisoners, and how the escapees from their number managed to get away. Finally, he managed to get an interview with an escaped prisoner on board a refugee ship. 

“Which one are you looking for?” she said, knowingly.

“I’m not looking for anyone, ma’am,” Jack said. “This is for research purposes only.”

“Military intelligence doesn’t care about how we were treated as much as you do,” she said. “Who are you trying to break out?”

Jack sighed, eyes fluttering closed. “Gray, from the Boeshane Peninsula.”

Her voice went taut. “Gray Boeshane? He broke himself out already.”

Jack stared at her gaunt, drawn face, intent. “Where is he?”

“Sir, please don’t,” she said. “Gray was with them too long. The man you’re trying to save, he doesn’t exist anymore. They _did things_ to him. What I had was bad enough, but anyone they got from the Boeshane, they – ”

“ _Where is he_?”

The refugee closed her eyes. “This will hurt you,” she said. “I hope one day you’ll forgive me. But if you just wait here long enough, he’ll find you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re from the Boeshane too, aren’t you? Gray hunts down people who survived the Boe. He says they’re traitors. He’s somewhere in the refugee fleet, and when he hears about you, he’ll find you.”

Jack didn’t believe her. He tried to hunt Gray down among the refugee ships.

Gray found him first.

Jack was in one of the cargo decks of the ship _Engineer Primus_ when a voice came from the communication system. “Long way from home, huh, Jacerel?” it said, low and gravelly and darkly amused.

He didn’t recognize the voice at first, and wondered who on the _Engineer Primus_ could possibly know his given name. Then he remembered: voices change over time. His hadn’t, not for forty years, and then one day it did. He had a man’s baritone now, and so did Gray. 

“ _Gray_ ,” he breathed. “Gray, I’ve been looking for you. I haven’t done anything but look for you since – where are you?”

“Looking for me, Jacerel?” said Gray. “It’s a little too late, don’t you think? Maybe you should have looked for me when the bombs fell.”

“I’m _sorry_ , Gray,” said Jack, choking on the old guilt made new again. “I couldn’t. I was so far away. I wish I could have been there when you needed me. But I didn’t have a choice.”

“ _You_ didn’t have a choice?” snarled Gray. “The Others had me for ten years. What kind of choices do you think they gave me? I thought you were dead, but when I got out, I found out the truth! You abandoned me!”

“No,” Jack said. “No. I would have done anything to be there for you. Anything. But there was nothing I could do.”

Jack heard metal clanking from the deck above. Then, from a corridor, came Gray, followed by what looked like every service robot on the _Engineer Primus_. They surrounded him, drill bits and pincer arms poised to strike. Gray looked more like one of the grim industrial robots than the lean, sun-kissed Boeshane boy Jack cherished in his memories.

“Gray,” said Jack. “I love you. Don’t you remember that?”

“Of course I remember,” said Gray. “Why do you think it hurts so much that you betrayed me?”

“Some of these are medical bots,” said Jack. “Who’s taking care of the sick? Who’s maintaining the sanitation deck?”

“No one,” said Gray. “They’re mine now. I need them for justice.”

“And what’s justice?” 

“What’s the sentence for treachery?”

“You want to kill me, Gray?” Jack spread his arms wide. “Do it. If you think that’s justice, well, I’m probably the last person who could say you’re wrong.”

Something flashed in Gray’s eyes, and Jack realized, numbly, that it was frustration. He’d wanted Jack to fight back. He wanted to see Jack plead for his life, for forgiveness, for mercy, so he could deny all three. He wanted revenge, not any kind of justice. The refugee had been right. There was nothing left of his brother.

Jack flipped up his wrist-comp. “Fleet all channels, hailing all channels. There’s been a hack into the service robot hive-mind network on the _Engineer Primus._ ”

A robot aimed an arc of electricity at Jack’s wrist-comp. It fizzled and died.

“They’ll never get here in time to save you,” sneered Gray.

“I know,” said Jack. “But they’ll get here in time to save everyone else on this ship.”

Jack turned around and ran.

It was hopeless, he knew. With the Doctor, he’d learned how to run hard and fast and long, but the robots would overwhelm him in the end. He could buy time, though, distract Gray from directing the robots at other targets. For the first time since he’d come Home, he’d be doing something good with his life. He’d lived for seventy five years, by his count, and maybe at the last his death would count for something. He held onto that as he wove through corridors and decks, the clanking of the robots and Gray’s accusations echoing behind him in a great roaring chorus.

“Come on, Jack!” someone ahead of him shouted. It was a familiar voice, but utterly impossible. Jack was sure it was a fragment of memory until he saw the tall, narrow man with a long brown coat, spiky hair, and too-old eyes.

“Harkness?!” Jack said.

“Yes, yes, but never mind that, there’s an escape pod this way with all the refugees on this ship in it and we’ve got to catch it before it goes!”

Jack let Harkness lead him to an unobtrusive hatch that opened into an escape pod packed with passengers, all frightened and chattering like birds. Harkness shouted to the pilot, “Allons-y, Alonzo, we’re off!”

The engines roared, and Jack and Harkness barely had time to strap in before the escape pod separated from the _Engineer Primus_. 

“You helped me and the other street kids back in Vikramantown,” said Jack. “I named myself after you. Jack Harkness.”

“Funny, that,” said Harkness softly, looking at Jack as if searching for the boy he’d been. “I thought I’d named myself after you.”

Time streams crossing – that had happened to him before, as a Time Agent. But worlds didn’t cross over. Not unless – “You’re a Homeward Bounder,” Jack said. “Why didn’t you tell me, then?”

“I couldn’t,” said Harkness. “Paradoxes are bad enough in one universe. A cross-universe paradox is more than I’m willing to risk, even for – ” He broke off, looking out the window at the _Octave Commander_ , the fleet’s flagship, looming nearer and nearer.

“For what?” said Jack.

“For someone who deserves it,” said Harkness.

Jack laughed bitterly. “You don’t know what I deserve. I’m not a poor lost kid anymore.”

“Of course you are,” said Harkness, as the pod pulled into dock at the _Octave Commander_. “And so am I.” 

It was only when they disembarked into the bustle of the great flagship that it hit him: he’d left Gray behind. Gray had left himself behind. He had no Home anywhere, and this world with all its scurrying people had the same feel of unreality that every other world did. That knowledge he’d had, when he’d landed here, of knowing he was where he ought to be, was gone.

Jack turned and found that Harkness was still there. Without thinking, he followed the man. “You lost your Home too.”

“I didn’t lose it,” said Harkness. “Neither did you. _They_ took it away from us.”

Jack thought of _them_ in the House of the Dead, _their_ holo-screens showing the invasion of the Others. _They_ played _their_ game, and his family paid the price. Yes. _They_ had taken it from him, and it probably registered as no more than a fraction of a point in a great score ledger. “What happened to yours?” he asked. “Only fair, since you saw what happened to mine.”

“My planet was obliterated,” Harkness said flatly. 

“Oh.” Jack couldn’t imagine that. At least he’d gotten to see the beaches of Boeshane before he chose to leave. He’d bobbed up and down on the waves, reliving his last moments with his family. Harkness didn’t get even that much.

He looked around at the crowd, rushing along like a stream of ghosts from one netherworld to the next. He remembered what the Doctor had said about the power of belief to sustain worlds. Now none of them were real anymore. Not to him. Maybe that meant _they_ had won, in the end. They’d made him into the ultimate disbeliever, a phantom of the multiverse.

“I have nowhere to go,” Jack found himself saying. It was as if he had to speak the words to know for sure that they were true. “What do you do with all of this time?”

“If you have nowhere to go,” Harkness said, rounding a corner into a service tunnel, “then you can go anywhere.” Jack followed him to the end of the tunnel, where there stood a great blue box with a light at the top. Harkness leaned against the box with easy familiarity. “If you could be anywhere in the multiverse, where would you want to be?”

Jack stared at the lighted words on the box. “POLICE,” written in the same alphabet he’d learned as a child. She was just as beautiful as he’d heard in countless fireside tales. “You’re a friend of the Doctor,” he said.

“I’m not certain that’s true,” Harkness said. “But I do shave his face in the morning.”

Jack stared at the man, at his narrow frame and wild hair that were nothing like the Doctor’s. Then he looked into his eyes, brown and dark with the weight of centuries, and wondered how he didn’t realize before. He clenched his fists and stepped into the Doctor’s personal space. “You complete bastard,” he pronounced.

The Doctor flattened himself against the side of the TARDIS. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Jack shook his head in amazement. “You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for.”

“For not telling you who I was from the beginning,” the Doctor offered.

“You couldn’t have done,” said Jack. “You’re right, it would have been a paradox. You’re a complete bastard because you _abandoned me_. I could have been there for you. I could have been there, when you lost everything, I could have helped, but you left me and you went _alone_ and you didn’t let me say goodbye!”

“No,” said the Doctor. “You couldn’t have helped.”

“Why not? Did our friendship mean _nothing_ to you?”

The Doctor’s voice trembled with a bone-deep rage. “It meant everything. When I found my Home gone, I realized I’d left behind the only good thing left in my long and miserable existence. So I went out and I killed every last one of the species that destroyed my planet.” The Doctor turned his head to the side, his cheek resting against blue wood. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to see that.”

Jack swallowed. He had no doubt the Doctor could have done as he said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to see that either,” he admitted. “But before you did that. When you were grieving. I could have been there, then. You took that choice away from me.”

“It would have been more than I deserve,” said the Doctor, facing him again. “But – I’m sorry.”

Jack felt shame curdle in his gut. “I became a soldier,” he said. “Then a Time Agency hitman. I’m no better than all those people we saw on all those worlds who killed each other for no reason.”

“And I’m a genocide,” said the Doctor. “Why are you looking at me like I can forgive you?”

“You killed a species that wiped out yours. I killed people whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Perhaps so,” said the Doctor. “But the person I had to become to do what I did is no better than the person you’ve become.”

“Is that what this is?” asked Jack, tugging a little at the lapel of the Doctor’s coat. “The person you had to become?”

“No. This is what happens to my species when we – when _I_ – die. In the fire, I forge myself into something new.”

Jack twitched a smile. “It’s not bad. I’ll miss the leather jacket, though.”

“You’ve changed rather a lot yourself,” the Doctor said, looking him up and down. “Of course you would end up with a face like that, you big flirt.”

“A face like what?” said Jack innocently.

“Fishing for compliments, are we? Well, the TARDIS is prettier than you, so there.” The Doctor took a key from his pocket and slid it in his ship’s lock, but paused to look at Jack before opening the door. “And I meant it when I said we could be anywhere in the multiverse. What do you say?”

“Wait,” said Jack. “You said you named yourself Harkness after me. What did you mean?”

“After I did what I felt I had to do,” said the Doctor, “I knew there was nothing left but to find you again. So the TARDIS and I went searching for you. I had a handkerchief of yours in my pocket. Homeward Bounders are easy to track with the right equipment, especially with an artron-infused DNA sample on hand. I saw that you were on that world, briefly, and I thought I’d try to make your start as a Homeward Bounder a little easier. I thought Harkness was your real surname, and I thought that taking that name might help you trust me a little. So I made myself the benefactor to the street children of Vikramantown, and waited for you.”

“You did help,” said Jack. “When that snake bit Kip – I don’t know what I would’ve done. I took your name to honor you.”

“And so we come full circle,” said the Doctor. 

“Take me somewhere you love,” said Jack. 

“I asked you where you’d want to be, if you could be anywhere.”

“The answer,” said Jack, “was that I wanted to be with you. The way it was before, when we’d go to a world and you’d find the most beautiful place and take me there. So take me. And maybe I’ll remember what it was like when there was a place where I wanted to be.”

The Doctor turned the key, wordlessly. He opened the doors wide. Jack stood on the threshold and took in the soft light, the arms of coral, the glowing column at the center. “You’re right,” he said. “She is prettier than me.” 

When he stepped inside, he was surrounded by a tingling hum that seemed to warm his bones.

“Flatterer,” the Doctor said. “She’ll be spoiling you for weeks.”

“I want to hear her when she moves,” Jack said quietly, stepping in, fingers light on the railing like a caress.

The Doctor grinned at the central column, the stupid grin of anyone in love, and danced around the console, flipping switches and spinning dials and twisting knobs. A sound surrounded them, the sinews of the universe shuddering in rhythm, followed by a soft thud. Jack thought it was the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard. 

The Doctor raised his eyebrows, an excited smile bursting out across his face. The doors opened, and a cold crisp wind blew in. The Doctor gestured for Jack to go first, but Jack shook his head and waited. The Doctor came down the ramp, and they left together, standing just close enough to feel each other’s body heat.

Jack wasn’t sure if it was the wind or the sight before him that stole his breath. They were on a cold beach at night, the light of two full moons and thousands of stars reflecting off an ocean frozen forever in the fury of a storm greater than any Jack had ever seen or imagined. Beneath the moon and stars, the ocean became an alien landscape of shining silver. Somewhere in the distance, he heard high liquid songs echoing across the frozen waves.

“Where is the music coming from?” Jack whispered. “I could swear I’ve heard it before…”

“You have,” the Doctor whispered back. It seemed wrong to speak above a hush, here.

Jack closed his eyes, and remembered.

* * *

_“And that, Jack,” said the Doctor, “is why they call it Woman Wept.”_

_The planet came into focus on the observation deck, and Jack watched the contour of the continent reveal itself in sweeps of blue and gray. It did look like a woman in grief. It reminded him suddenly, forcefully, of his mother, and the mortal danger he’d return to when he got Home. If she lost him or Gray or Dad, she’d look just like that…_

_“’Course,” the Doctor said gently, “some insectoid life-forms say it looks more like a larva grooming itself.”_

_Jack laughed, the old image wiped away by the new. The Doctor always knew what to say. “Where are we going there?”_

_“Where do you want to go?”_

_Determined not to let his memories get the better of him, Jack said, “The ocean down there looks beautiful.”_

_“Then we’ll get ourselves on board a ship.”_

_They signed on as crew with a fishing boat. Jack taught the Doctor how to rig sails and tie the right knots, and flirted shamelessly with the captain’s daughter. At night, they took watch duty together and listened to the sounds of the sea._

_“I wonder where that music is coming from,” said Jack, listening to the high-pitched melodies that flowed like water around them. He leaned over the railing and peered down into the dark ocean. “Is there a chorus singing somewhere down there? Or a pod of whales?”_

_“Wrong timbre for that,” said the Doctor. “It sounds like it’s getting carried through the air.”_

_“Another ship, then?” Jack said doubtfully, looking around at the empty horizons surrounding them._

_“Shh. We’ll wait and see.”_

_Jack watched the waves sigh against the boat’s hull, then tilted his head back to watch the low clouds crawl across the moons, one full, one gibbous. He noticed that one of the clouds was moving faster than the others – and that it wasn’t a cloud at all. It was a flock of birds with deep purple feathers. As they moved closer, the songs grew louder. Jack tapped the Doctor on the shoulder and pointed. As the birds flew, the shadows of their wings shattered the moonlight into a thousand dizzying fragments on the water._

_Soon they were surrounded by fluting strains of melody. Jack reached out and held the Doctor’s hand. They turned their faces up to the sky, the same soft smile on their faces._

* * *

“This is Woman Wept,” said Jack. “What happened?”

“Catastrophic solar event. Shift in the composition of the – never mind. The people all managed to evacuate in time. Most of the life remaining on the planet was wiped out. Not those birds, though.”

“I want to see them,” said Jack.

They walked together out on the frozen ocean, climbing the waves they could and going around the ones they couldn’t. When Jack saw the wash of silver moonlight break into shifting shards, he looked up. The birds were there, their songs cocooning him and the Doctor in sound, just as they had so many years ago. 

Jack sagged back against a curl of frozen foam. This place, Woman Wept, was _real_. It was just as real as the beach on the Boe had been when his dad lit a fire in a sandpit, and the air smelled of sea-wind and wood-smoke, and Gray pretended he was a monster who’d crawled out of the sea.

Once the flock had passed them by, the Doctor turned to Jack. “Are you all right?”

“Remember the rules?”

The Doctor blinked. “Yes. Rule One, Homeward Bounders can’t age or die outside their home universe. Rule Two, no one can interfere with a Homeward Bounder.”

“To hell with the rules. I think you just proved in my world that Rule Two doesn’t apply to us anymore, and Rule One is a fundamental principle, not a rule. You might as well call gravity a rule. I’ve got some new rules.”

The Doctor raised his eyebrows.

“Rule One: Every world, and every person living in them, is real.”

The Doctor’s face was impassive, but there was a hint of a smile in his eyes. Jack wondered when the Doctor had figured out Rule One for himself, as he, Jack, just had.

“Rule Two: Everyone who has a Home has a right to live there.”

“I like the new rules,” said the Doctor. “I definitely intend to live by Rule One, especially since it’ll work against _them_. Rule Two is too late for us, of course.”

“Too late for _us_ ,” Jack said. “You said Homeward Bounders are easy to track. How many are there?”

“I don’t know.”

Jack looked around at the icy sea, once so alive. “The TARDIS travels in time, too.” He turned his gaze to the Doctor. “Rule Two is too late for us. But we can make sure that no one else ever comes Home too late.”

“It could take a long time to find the right universe for each Homeward Bounder,” the Doctor said, but the light of interest in his eyes belied his words.

“It’s a better chance than they have on the Bounds. And while we’re looking, we can teach them all about Rule One.”

The look the Doctor gave him then was so fond Jack felt himself squirm a little inside with pleasure, as he once had whenever he took well to one of the Doctor’s lessons and the man had praised him for it. “We’ll have to live many lifetimes longer to get them all Home. Can you do that, Jack?”

Jack thought of his life. He hadn’t really lived any of it but the first fourteen years – and three more, in the middle. But maybe, with the Doctor, he could learn how to do it properly. “Where do we start?”

The Doctor turned toward the TARDIS and beckoned. Jack followed, his excitement bringing the starlight and the cold drag of air in his lungs into even sharper focus. The multiverse had never been so vast and thrilling. It was all real, the whole teeming multitude of worlds, and he had a place within it.

“You might be able to help,” the Doctor said at the console. “How are you at ten-dimensional vector calculations?”

“Top 10% of my class in the Time Agency in higher-dimension vector math,” said Jack. 

“Then come here and check my work,” said the Doctor. “I was at the bottom of my class.”

Jack laughed in sheer surprise at that. When he was younger, he’d thought the Doctor knew everything. He came and watched the screen as the Doctor did his work, gently pointing out mistakes when they arose. 

The calculations proved more challenging than the Doctor had initially expected. They stopped for dinner, and Jack watched with a childlike amazement he hadn’t felt in years as the Doctor used the TARDIS’ top of the line kitchen technology to make a delicious-smelling curry in five minutes flat. They ate dinner, and the Doctor told stories from his search for Jack, the false leads he’d chased, the younger versions of him he’d seen. Jack listened, secretly touched by how much effort the Doctor had put into finding him.

When they finished dinner, Jack said, “Is there a cot I can set up somewhere?”

“A cot?” the Doctor echoed.

“For sleeping. I’m dead on my feet.”

“A cot! You’re not getting a cot, Jack Harkness. The TARDIS made you a suite! Come here.”

“I don’t need a suite,” Jack protested, following him. “I was in the army, you know. I slept in barracks.”

“Not anymore,” the Doctor said. “You may not need one, but the TARDIS wants you to have one, and so you shall.” He opened a door with a flourish.

It was a scene straight out of the Boe, before the war tightened their belts: a water bed in a suspended web frame, with sweet-smelling rushes scattered on the ground. One wall had a mural of the sun rising over open ocean, wreathed by pink-gold clouds.

Jack rubbed the doorjamb. “Well, old girl, you’ve got me cornered. It’d be downright rude to turn down a gift like this.” He hoped the tears he was holding back couldn’t be heard in his voice, because he had a feeling that the suite wasn’t a gift from the TARDIS alone.

“That’s the spirit,” the Doctor said, and for a second, Jack thought the Doctor might call him “lad” again, even after all these years. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Jack didn’t sleep soundly – that would be impossible after a day like today – but he did manage to sleep, which was better than he might have hoped. Every time he woke up, gasping, a gentle pulse in the TARDIS’ background hum eased him back to sleep.

In the morning, he found a sachet of herbs for a traditional Boeshane drink in a kitchen cupboard, and made himself a cup, as well as a pair of fried eggs with alarmingly blue yolks.

When he was finished with breakfast, he found the Doctor busy at his vector math again, and settled in to help. They worked companionably, until the Doctor cried, “Aha!”

Jack peered at the screen, where a set of spacetime coordinates, with an extra field for the universe vector, was worked out to the hundredth digit.

“That’ll be four – no, five – universes over on the NOT Bound,” the Doctor said, mostly to himself, or perhaps to the TARDIS. To Jack, he said, “Ready?”

“I think so.”

“Allons-y!” The Doctor pounded a button and began the dance of navigation. Jack watched, entranced, hoping one day the Doctor and the TARDIS would teach him how to do it too. 

When they landed, they found themselves in a public toilet – empty and all-gender, thankfully. They stepped out of the toilet into a waiting room full of toys and corny posters. A door opened, and a little red-haired girl came rocketing out, followed at a more sedate pace by a seal-like being nursing a bite on its flipper. 

“I haven’t done anything wrong!” the girl shouted. “It’s not my fault! _They_ made me leave Home and go to all these rubbish worlds!”

Jack realized with a jolt that he could immediately understand the girl’s words, without any of the usual delay from his translator chip. Had the Doctor secretly injected him with a better chip?

The injured seal-being used its unaffected flipper to tap a comm unit on the wall. “Nurse, Amelia Pond will need a prescription for an anti-psychotic.”

Amelia was hiding behind a tower of building blocks. “No! I won’t take any pills!”

“My dear, without a guardian, you are a ward of the state,” said the psychiatrist. “We must make these decisions for your welfare.”

“Actually,” said the Doctor, his voice hard, “we’re her guardians, and we say she can’t be medicated without our approval.”

“Well!” said the psychiatrist. “It’s about time you showed up! Amelia claims she hasn’t got anyone caring for her!”

Amelia came out from behind the building blocks and climbed up on top of a chair. “You’re not my guardians! What do you want?”

The Doctor took out his psychic paper. “Sorry, she gets like this. I’m Harkness Pond, and this is my husband Jack. We adopted Amelia not long ago. She’s still adjusting.”

Jack walked slowly toward the chair Amelia had perched on, then dropped to his knees and looked up at her. “We know you’re a Homeward Bounder,” he said, too quietly for the psychiatrist to hear. “We’re here to help.”

Amelia gave him a long, considering look. Then she announced, “Fine, _Dad,_ ” and hopped down from the chair.

“Give me the paperwork,” the Doctor said firmly, and the psychiatrist fetched him a tablet computer and a stylus.

“I won’t take any pills, even if you help me,” Amelia informed Jack. 

“We won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do,” Jack said quietly. “Here’s what’s going to happen. My friend – he’s called the Doctor – is filling out some forms that will make it so they can’t make you see the psychiatrist. When he’s done, the Doctor and I are going to the toilet. That’s where our spaceship is parked.”

“You can’t have a spaceship,” Amelia said. “I can’t take anything with me on the Bounds except what I’ve got in my pockets. And a spaceship wouldn’t fit in the bathroom, I’ve seen them.”

“Our spaceship is special. But you don’t have to come with us. You can just come with us and have a look at the spaceship, and if you decide you’d rather stay on your own, you can go.”

“Fine,” said Amelia. “I’ll have a look. But if you’re lying, I’ll bite you too.”

“Deal.”

The Doctor finished up the paperwork, signing it with a flourish. “There. We decline medical treatment for our daughter.” He glanced sidelong at Jack and Amelia. “Now, if you’ll pardon us, we could all use the toilet now.”

Amelia nodded. The three of them went into the toilet together.

“That’s not a spaceship,” said Amelia. “That’s a _box_. How’d you get it in here?”

“You’re right,” said the Doctor. “She’s not really a spaceship. She’s called the TARDIS, and she can travel through time and between worlds, too.” He gave her a fond pat, then unlocked the door. Orange-green light spilled onto the tiled floor.

Amelia stepped inside and gaped. She went back out and walked around the TARDIS, then back in. Then she looked down at the shapeless gray gown she was wearing. “I’m in a nightie,” she said, disbelieving.

“That’s all right,” the Doctor said. “Jack’s clothes are made of insect spittle.”

Jack grimaced. On the refugee fleet, he’d been posing as an outer-planet academic, and it was standard practice on a couple of colony worlds in his home universe to make fabric out of the saliva of a specially bred beetle.

“That’s grotty,” said Amelia, laughing at Jack.

Jack and the Doctor joined Amelia in the TARDIS. She walked around the console, peering at the controls. 

“Whatever you do,” said the Doctor, “don’t touch the zyxijax, that’s the twisty one over there, or the gnolloph, that’s the flashy bit, or you know what, you probably shouldn’t touch anything.”

Amelia’s brow creased. “You just spoke in Scots! How do you know Scots?”

“I don’t,” said the Doctor. “The TARDIS is translating for all of us.”

“You could have told me,” Jack said. “I thought maybe you’d snuck a syringe with a translator chip into the base of my skull somehow.”

“Your ship can translate too? That’s amazing!”

Jack placed a gentle hand on Amelia’s shoulder. “The Doctor’s about to fly her. Just watch.”

The Doctor took out a mallet from under the console, hit a spring with it, and so the dematerialization sequence began. All the while, Amelia watched the central rotor rise and fall. When it was over, she said in a small voice, “Can your TARDIS take me Home?”

The Doctor sat in the jumpseat to bring himself closer to her eye level. “Yes, though I’ve got to look for it first, and that might take time. But I promise we’ll take care of you while we’re searching. Can you tell me about your Home?”

“Rory,” Amelia blurted out. “I mean, that’s not what my Home’s called, it’s called Leadworth, but it’s boring and I hate it and I can’t leave ‘cause Aunt Sharon says we’ve got to live there. Rory’s the one I’ve got to get back to. He’s my best friend.”

“All right. I’m going to ask you a few questions about your world that will help me find it. Do you know the names of any stars?”

“There’s the North Star. That’s in a constellation named Boudica, after a warrior queen. I don’t know any others.”

“And how many planets are there in your solar system?”

“Eight.”

The Doctor’s voice went a little more intent. “Where did you find _them_?”

“In an abandoned wing of the home for old people. Rory said I shouldn’t go, but it was spooky and I like to look at spooky places. Or at least, I _used_ to like to.” She scowled. “I should’ve listened to him.”

The round of questions went on until Amelia started to look bored, at which point the Doctor stood up and said, “Well, Amelia, I’m going to get started looking for your Home very soon. But first, how would you like to go on holiday?”

“On holiday?”

“You know! A holiday! We’ll go to a nice sunny place on a world where you can have an ice cream.”

“I haven’t been to any worlds with ice creams yet. That was the _sixth_ world where they made me go to a psychiatrist.”

“Did you bite the others too?” said Jack, smiling.

“Yes. They wouldn’t listen when I said I was a Homeward Bounder. They said I was mad.”

“I’ll take you to a world with lots of ice cream and no psychiatrists,” the Doctor promised. “What do you say?”

“All right!”

They landed in a botanical garden drenched in green-gold sunlight. There were no humans to be seen among the artful swirls of trees and flowers, only beings that looked like snakes with elephant trunks on their faces and delicate little flying shrimp floating along in bubbles the size of Amelia’s head. She stood frozen in front of the TARDIS, staring at the plants and the people with equal amazement.

After a long silence, she demanded, “Which of those eats ice cream? The snakes or the shrimp?”

“Neither. Some of the plants do. I hear their favorite flavor is raspberry,” the Doctor said. “Come on, this way, let’s try some!”

They all bought ice creams at the creamery, and Amelia looked ready to wander off into a field of flowers with her chocolate cone, but she was brought short by the sight of a gardener feeding ice cream to a great gnarled cactus-tree. She watched in fascination, her own forgotten ice cream slowly dripping on the pavement.

“I think Amelia’s learning a thing or two about Rule One,” said the Doctor, sidling up to Jack as they watched Amelia watching the gardener. He took a big lick of his banana ice cream.

“What made you realize?” said Jack. “That it’s all real.”

“There’s a part I left out,” the Doctor said, after a pause to eat more ice cream. “After I killed the Daleks, but before I went looking for you, I traveled with someone. Not a Homeward Bounder. A woman named Donna Noble. She was nothing more and nothing less than an ordinary person who wanted to have an adventure. She was my best mate. And when I was with her, it all became real again.”

“Yes,” said Jack. “It’s hard not to believe, when you’re with someone you love.”

The Doctor tore his eyes from Amelia and looked at Jack. His face was open, surprised, and unexpectedly… vulnerable. 

Jack realized, then, that he would very much like to kiss the Doctor. He wondered if the Doctor would like that too. He imagined how the strawberry taste in his mouth would mingle with the Doctor’s banana ice cream, the flavors cold on their tongues. Jack let the desire percolate behind his ribs, savoring the feel of it in his heart.

“Doctor! Jack! Look!” Amelia cried. “There’s a lizard-thing trying to steal the ice cream from the cactus!”

The Doctor and Jack shared a private smile, then went to see what Amelia was watching in the garden. The moment was gone, for now. But Jack could wait.

Life and love were easier to bear, now that he had finally made it Home.


End file.
